Nintendo Shutting Down The Wii Shop Channel in 2019

Nintendo announced today that the Wii Shop Channel will be no more in 2019. The company's Japanese arm posted the news this morning, translated via Gematsu. The Wii Shop Channel is the only digital store available on the platform, so once it's gone, users will only be able to buy physical games.

Owners will no longer be able to add Wii Points to their accounts starting March 27, 2018 at 4:59AM JST (3:49PM EST/12:59PM PST). Nintendo will then shut down the Wii Shop Channel completely on January 31, 2019 at 14:59 JST (1:59AM EST/10:59PM PST).

If you've already purchased content, you will still be able to redownload that content onto your Wii; this is just the loss of purchase ability. Wii System Transfer to the Wii U will also continue to work. Nintendo added that these services will also be shut down at a later, undisclosed date. After that point, what you have on your system or in physical copy is what you have on your Wii.

Are you prepared?

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How many digital-only Wii games are about to be lost to the void forever? Personally, I think it's a damned, crying shame that it will no longer be possible for anyone to obtain copies of Konami's Rebirth series of games.

I wonder. If people purchased digital-only games, and "at some undisclosed future date" Nintendo makes it impossible for them to obtain their legally-purchased games when the download service shuts down, will those customers have any legal recourse? Will people that still have Wii Points in their wallets be refunded the value of their now-worthless digital currency, or will Nintendo just pocket the cash and leave?

Just one more incentive to never buy digital.Edited September 2017 by KaiserWarrior

@LBD_Nytetrayn It's a pretty good Gradius game, and if you like the ReBirth games' schtick of "what if we'd made an arcade board of this game in the early 90s", you'll enjoy the heck out of it. I recommend it.

The writing's been on the wall for a while and I haven't bought anything off the Wii Shop Channel in several years, but I still find myself a bit wistful over this news; the Wii's Virtual Console was genuinely one of the two or three biggest reasons why I bought the system so early, and was where I put most of the money I spent on software for the first couple of years.

....I say this as someone who had to spend 2 weekends putting together my own Rondo of Blood CD with just the ISO and MP3 files available to me, from some random site I found years ago - I had to hunt down the proper files and version of that PCE MAGIC emulator and wasted 5 CD-Rs in the process.